Continuity of care and clinical effectiveness: treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder in the Department of Veterans Affairs

Abstract

Evaluation of the quality of outpatient treatment for patients with severe psychiatric or addictive disorders has often focused on the assessment of continuity of care (COC) as measured with administrative data. However, there has been little empirical evaluation of the relationship of measures of COC and treatment outcomes. This study used hierarchical linear modeling to examine the relationship between 6 indicators of COC and 6 outcome measures in a multisite monitoring effort for veterans with war-related posttraumatic stress disorder. There were few consistently significant associations between COC and outcome measures. Although measures of COC at the level of individual patients were associated with reductions in substance abuse symptoms, when COC measures were averaged to the site level and examined with hierarchical linear modeling models, thereby reducing the impact of intrasite selection bias, they were not associated with any desired outcomes. COC measures, at least in the sample used for this study, are not consistently associated with desirable client outcomes and may therefore be less than ideal performance measures in outcome evaluations following inpatient treatment, except to the extent that COC is considered to be an intrinsic indicator of higher quality regardless of its relationship to outcomes.